Valerie Teicher’s debut full-length as Tei Shi, 2017’s Crawl Space, was an album of transformation, of surmounting fears. The record rested on a base of ’80s-inspired synth pop and the natural flexibility of Teicher’s voice, setting a course away from the indie pop of her first EPs. La Linda is also a record of change, the product of a move to Los Angeles from New York, where she was troubled by stifling relationships and her guarded state of mind. The album’s pared-down R&B matches Teicher’s newfound clarity and further centers her voice. “I wanted this whole project to reflect the feeling of stepping into another world that’s almost surreal or fantastical in its beauty,” she says. But the beauty she discovers is almost claustrophobic, simmering in romantic pain more often than it embraces the freedom that exists beyond it.
Appearing last year on Blood Orange’s “Hope,” on Negro Swan, she sang from the perspective of someone continually let down by their lover, and she slips into the same mode of disappointment for the majority of La Linda, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess. Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes returns on “Even If It Hurts,” in which Teicher begs for honesty from her partner, admitting that she doesn’t want to “feel crazy” anymore. The Spanish-language “Matando” also addresses the relationship between love and emotional wear. But if before she was willing to wait for her partner to change, here Teicher is about to walk away. “Mi amor, tu amor me está matando” (“My love, your love is killing me”) she sings; “Está llegando el fin” (“The end is coming”). The album often feels like her last look back—a drawn-out kiss goodbye—before she moves on to something better.
On her earlier records, Teicher occasionally strained with the effort of expressing herself, her voice breaking into a yell. But La Linda exchanges that roughness for immaculate ballads performed in Teicher’s high, whispery register. The album operates largely in the same style of sultry pop that Ariana Grande has perfected: The languid beat and bouncing chorus of “Red Light,” a track about time wasted on a dead relationship, are cut from similar cloth as thank u, next, and on “Alone in the Universe,” when Teicher confesses, “I don’t know if there is a god/But if she is a woman/I would say that she’s dropping the ball,” it’s difficult not to hear an echo of Grande’s “God is a woman,” from last year’s Sweetener. The album’s more subdued cuts, like “Thief” and closer “We,” counter that high gloss, pointing back to a time when Teicher’s music consisted of little more than her voice looped over a bassline.
When Teicher gives herself over entirely to the wreckage of heartache, her songwriting floods the album’s lean production with its emotional force. Two tracks offer contrasting takes on obsession’s ruin, with Teicher brandishing her feelings like offerings to be burned and discarded. The country-tinged “When He’s Done” sounds like someone who knows they’re going to crash but still pumps the pedal because acceleration feels good. Teicher lengthens each word, helpless in the face of a love that she knows is destined to hurt her: “I believe whatever, I guess.” It’s a heartbreaking account of placing someone else before your own well-being. And on “No Juegues,” she commands, “Don’t play with my love,” but her confidence falters by the end, as she repeats, “Mi amor no vale nada” (“My love is worth nothing”). They’re songs that self-destructively consume pain in order to transcend it, leaving Teicher to rebuild herself from the debris.
